eye was now turned towards him, and for a full minute so dead was the silence, that one might have heard a pin drop. "I see, my friends," said the Doctor, resuming speech, with a suppressed smile--"I see you can be all quiet enough when I am quiet." There was not a little genuine strategy in the rebuke; and as cough lies a good deal more under the influence of the will than most coughers suppose, such was its effect, that during the rest of the day there was not a tithe of the previous coughing. The one-roomed cottage which I shared with its three other inmates, did not present all the possible conveniences for study; but it had a little table in a corner, at which I contrived to write a good deal; and my book-shelf already exhibited from twenty to thirty volumes, picked up on Saturday evenings at the book-stalls of the city, and which were all accessions to my little library. I, besides, got a few volumes to read from my friend William Ross, and a few more through my work-fellow Cha; and so my rate of acquirement in book-knowledge, if not equal to that of some former years, at least considerably exceeded what it had been in the previous season, which I had spent in the Highlands, and during which I had perused only three volumes--one of the three a slim volume of slim poems, by a lady, and the other, that rather curious than edifying work, "Presbyterian Eloquence Displayed." The cheap literature had not yet been called into existence; and, without in the least undervaluing its advantages, it was, I daresay, better on the whole as a mental exercise, and greatly better in the provision which it made for the future, that I should have to urge my way through the works of our best writers in prose and verse--works which always made an impression on the memory--than that I should have been engaged instead in picking up odds and ends of information from loose essays, the hasty productions of men too little vigorous, or too little at leisure, to impress upon their writings the stamp of their own individuality. In quiet moonlight nights I found it exceedingly pleasant to saunter all alone through the Niddry woods. Moonlight gives to even leafless groves the charms of full foliage, and conceals tameness of outline in a landscape. I found it singularly agreeable, too, to listen, from a solitude so profound as that which a short walk secured to me, to the distant bells of the city ringing out, as the clock struck eight, the old curfew peal; and to mark, from under the interlacing boughs of a long-arched vista, the intermittent gleam of the Inchkeith light now brightening and now fading, as the lanthorn revolved. In short, the winter passed not unpleasantly away: I had now nothing to annoy me in the work-shed; and my only serious care arose from my unlucky house in Leith, for which I found myself summoned one morning, by an officer-looking man, to pay nearly three pounds--the last instalment which I owed, I was told, as